About a year ago, Chris Jones wrote a profile for Esquire on Roger Ebert, the film critic who has and continues to inspire people everywhere. Further evidence of this man's power to captivate us, beyond the Twitter and his blog and his reviews and his new show: Reports of his speech this weekend that closed the annual (closed) TED conference are beginning to burn up the web, despite there not being any video of the thing online yet. (Related: TED, what'\'s with these delays every year?) With that in mind, we pulled together the best quotes of Ebert's talk, for motivation, if not an update on an essential man.

"I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me. I felt — and I still feel — a lot of distance from the human mainstream. I become uncomfortable when I'm separated from my laptop."

"I've been able to find out what the buzzwords 'social network' really mean. I cannot speak; I can only type so fast, but with my computer, I can communicate as well as ever before."

"All my life I was a motor-mouth. Now I've spoken my last words, and I don't even remember, for sure, what they were."

"If the computer can successfully tell a joke, and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want."

"Because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream."

"I felt like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.'"

"For most of my life I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak. It was like breathing. In those days I was living in a fool's paradise. After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer did some of my living for me."